Rocket-fueled by NSFW Skyrim add-ons, Nexus Mods hits the 10 billion downloads milestone
Every five million or so cultured people helps.
One of the world’s biggest modding platforms, Nexus Mods, has just smashed through the incredibly huge total of 10 billion total downloads across its entire catalogue of games. And yes, NSFW Skyrim mods definitely played a part in the achievement.
Apparently this is something the team behind Nexus Mods has had its eye on for a while (the milestone that is, not the NSFW mods), and it’s a cool way to see just how popular modding has become, even if it’s been a thing for a decently long time. There’s even been some interesting pizza maths done to put the numbers into context, which I’m about to try and shamelessly one-up by talking about smut.
In a news post, Nexus Mods community manager Demorphic explained: “These 10,000,000,000 downloads are spread across 539,682 mod files, created by a vibrant community of 128,361 mod authors, serving over 47 million total members, modding 2,683 different games.”
To put this into context, they outlined that: “If every download were a footstep, you could walk to the moon 11 times, or walk [Skyrim’s] Seven Thousand Steps to High Hrothgar 4,161,464 times.” Or if you prefer food-based analogies: “If we celebrated every download with a slice of pizza, this pizza would cover 15 times the size of Manhattan Island.”
But, we all know that’s not enough context, so here’s some of my own, which will convey the numbers via the only medium that we all understand and an area of modding that definitely played a role in Nexus Mods’ achievement - NSFW Skyrim mods.
Ok, so, there’s a Skyrim mod called Flower Girls. It adds female NPCs to the game, which the Dragonborn can do the dirty with. Calm down please. As of writing, the Skyrim Special Edition and VR version of it on the nexus has amassed 5,706,803 total downloads. So, if my maths is right, this milestone is roughly equivalent to what you’d have if the platform was solely made up of 1752 different versions of Flower Girls, all boasting that download total.
You want more? First of all, that’s a phrase that I imagine comes up a lot when playing these kinds of mods, and second of all, here you go. ONights - NPC Sex Lives is a mod that, as the name suggests, gives Skyrim’s NPCs actual sex lives, “for the purpose of atmosphere”.
Don’t worry, it’s tasteful. Seriously, the description specifies that couples will stop shagging if the player barges in on them. Anyway, it currently boasts 283,883 total downloads.
That means you’d need about 35,225 versions of it, all with that download total, to make 10 billion.
Congrats, Nexus Mods.
If you're interested in some non-NFSW mods for Bethesda games, be sure to check out our coverage of the recent Skyblivion and Fallout: London showcases at C3.